Tuesday, January 3, 2017

I love ebikes

Here's me ebiking to work at Boss Fight Entertainment in McKinney, TX, on a custom ebike built from parts acquired from ebikes.ca. In this video, I was only running at around 40v 20a, and the rest of the power was coming from peddling (me!). I eventually pushed the controller to its limit (100v), and switched from A123 LiFe cells to the much more "touchy" LiPo chemistry.

Dallas turned out to be a wonderfully ebike friendly area. There are endless miles and miles of golf cart trails, bike/walking trails, and virtually unused streets all over the Dallas metroplex. Also, I was almost invisible in Dallas as an ebiker. (Which is both good, and bad.)

3 comments:

Typical (and legal) in the US is up to 20mph in most states. At 40v I think the max speed was around 22mph without pedaling. At 100v I could go way over that if I wanted (and was crazy enough) to do so.

I took my ebike out for a spin on NYE to test out my new GoPro 5. Made it about half way to White Rock from Plano before I remembered I had to be at a party that night. Hopefully I can get a full recording to there in the next week, given we've had warmer weather lately

About Me

Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.